Sébastien Moureau - University of Louvain

Dr Gemma Pellissa Prades

Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel

Blanca Villuendas

腳本

[MUSIC] Hi there, welcome back. I hope most of you are still with us for this final week of our MOOC, Magic in the Middle Ages. Today, we're pretty excited because for those of you who took the first edition of this course, this whole unit is full of new materials we are quite proud of. And for those of you who are taking this course for the first time, this is one example of how much attention we pay to your comments and suggestions. So please share them with us. The videos of unit five will be devoted to astrology and geomancy, the not-so-little sisters of medieval science. I know this is probably a shocking statement, but please don't judge this book by its cover, and give us the chance
to tell you about them so that by the end of these videos, you can form your own opinion about it, (and of course discuss it with us and with your classmates). Today, we will start with astrology, shall we? Let's not be shy here. Nowadays, astrology is a marginal discipline, at least
in the Western world. It has been banished to a regular but mingy newspaper column or to the most unfriendly time slot in television. The sociological profile of its usual practitioners doesn't help there,
either. In any case, given its current situation,
few would suspect that until recently, astrology boasted its status as a science, or that throughout the Middle Ages as well as in antiquity, astrological literature developed profusely sharing, on the one hand, the transmission routes of astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. and, on the other, the ways of the most diverse set of divination techniques. Let us recall, for instance, that in the late 16th century, for some of the leading figures of the so-called European
Scientific Revolution, astrology was still the science of the stars. For them, the influence of celestial bodies over the sublunary world as they called it, that is, literally, the world under the Moon, which includes us humans, was no less subject to natural laws and no less researchable or understandable than the quality, the speed or the motions of those celestial bodies which are the object of astronomy. And I'm not talking about obscure anonymous figures either. I'm talking about Galileo Galilei, who probably
doesn't need an introduction; about Tycho Brahe, who wrote about supernovae in the 16th century, daring to refute Aristotle's idea that the sky didn't change; and about Johannes Kepler, the first one to develop the laws of planetary motion that are still taught today in faculties of physics all over the world. This does not mean however that the prestige of astrology was universal and uncontested along the centuries. Opposition to the "scientific validity" of astrological predictions, (and note the quotation marks there for this is a huge anachronism), was no innovation of medieval European Christianity. Take for example the introductory defense of astrology that Ptolemy felt compelled to make in his great astrological handbook written in the second century of our Era. The <i>Apotelesmatiká</i> (literally, effects), also known as the <i>Tetrabiblós</i> (four books), and please excuse my dreadful Greek pronunciation, Again, we are talking about a figure that was respected throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the Alexandrian scholar who wrote the <i>Almagest</i>, the book where he presented what we know as the Ptolemaic system to explain the motions of the stars, a geocentric model that was taken at face value until the appearance of the Copernican heliocentric system in the late 16th century, that is, about 1400 years later. Ptolemy's argument in favour of astrology was sound and would be taken up repeatedly by later authorities. If astrological predictions don't guess right, if they fail to predict the future, the fault lies not with the science and its method, but with the fraudulent intent of pseudo-astrologers and the lack of skill of some practitioners who are incapable of encompassing the enormity of the discipline and the subtlety of its principles. Far from supporting Ptolemy's point of view, (remember we are not here to judge history, but to try and understand it) the truth is that his defense/ denunciation serves also as a reminder of a fact that we need to keep in mind when we deal with historical astrology. It was not just a science with the aspiration to determine the influence of the stars on the world below. Since ancient times astrology had also been an occupation. A source of income which often attracted individuals motivated by an interest that was much more material than scientific, and who were more concerned with maintaining their clientele than with respecting the principles and rules of the discipline they practiced. In our next video, we will see how
an astonishing variety of astrological traditions found their way to the medieval West, where they merged and gave birth to a rich and complex discipline that
unlike any other with the possible exception of medicine, bears witness to the cultural cradle that is Europe's most valuable legacy to the world. Stay tuned! [MUSIC]